Related article: of things that most people never suspected had an essence, and
bullshit is a case in point. Could there really be some property that
all instances of bullshit possess and all non-instances lack? The
question might sound ludicrous, but Asacol Ec 400 Mg Tablet it is, at least in form, no
different from one that philosophers ask about truth. Among the most
divisive issues in philosophy today is whether there is anything
important to be said about the essential nature of truth. Bullshit, by
contrast, might seem to be a mere bagatelle. Yet there are parallels
between the two which lead to the same perplexities.
Where do you start if you are an academic philosopher in search of the
quiddity of bullshit? "So far as I am aware," Frankfurt dryly
observes, "very little work has been done on this subject." He did
find an earlier philosopher's attempt to analyze a similar concept
under a more genteel name: humbug. Humbug, that philosopher decided,
was a pretentious bit of misrepresentation that fell short of lying.
(A politician talking about the importance of his religious faith
comes to mind.) Frankfurt was not entirely happy with this definition.
The difference between lies and bullshit, it seemed to him, was more
than a matter of degree. To push the Asacol Canada analysis in a new direction, he
considers a rather peculiar anecdote about the philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein. It was the nineteen-thirties, and Wittgenstein had gone
to the hospital to Asacol 500 Mg visit a friend whose tonsils had just been taken
out. Asacol 400 Mg Price She croaked to Wittgenstein, "I Asacol Hd Coupon feel just like a How Much Does Asacol Cost dog that has
been run over." Wittgenstein (the friend recalled) was disgusted to
hear her say this. "You don't know what a dog that has been run over
feels like," he snapped. Of course, Wittgenstein might simply have
been joking. But Frankfurt suspects that his severity was real, not
feigned. This was, after all, a man who devoted his life to combatting
what he considered to be pernicious forms of nonsense. What
Wittgenstein found offensive in his friend's simile, Frankfurt
guesses, was its mindlessness: "Her fault is not that she fails to get
things right, but that she is not even trying."
The essence of bullshit, Frankfurt decides, is that it is produced
without any concern for the truth. Bullshit needn't be false: "The
bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he
necessarily gets them wrong." The bullshitter's fakery consists not in
misrepresenting a state of affairs but in concealing his own
indifference to the truth of what he says. The liar, by contrast, is
concerned with the truth, in a perverse sort of fashion: he Asacol Mr wants to
lead us away from it. As Frankfurt sees it, the liar and the
truthteller are playing on opposite sides of the Buy Cheap Asacol same game, a game
defined by the authority of truth. The bullshitter opts out of this
game altogether. Unlike the liar and the truthteller, he is not guided
in what he says by his beliefs about Asacol Hd Dr 800 Mg the way things are. And that,
Frankfurt says, is what Asacol Hd Dosing makes bullshit so dangerous: it unfits a
person for telling the truth.
Frankfurt's account of bullshit is doubly remarkable. Not only Asacol Hd 800 Mg does he
define it in a novel way Asacol Ec that distinguishes it from lying; he also
uses this definition to establish a powerful claim: "Bullshit is a
greater enemy of truth than lies are." If this is true, we ought to be
tougher on someone caught bullshitting Asacol Hd Price than we are on someone caught
lying. Unlike the bullshitter, the liar at least cares about the
truth. But isn't this account a little too flattering to the liar? In
theory, of course, there could be liars who are motivated by sheer
love of deception. This type was identified by St. Asacol Hd Dosage Augustine in his
treatise "On Lying." Someone who tells a lie as a means to some other
goal tells it "unwillingly," Augustine says. The pure liar, by
contrast, "takes delight in lying, rejoicing in the falsehood itself."
But such liars are exceedingly rare, Asacol Mr Tablets as Frankfurt concedes. Not even
Iago had that purity of heart. Ordinary tellers of lies simply aren't
principled adversaries of the truth. Suppose an unscrupulous used-car
salesman is showing you a car. He tells Asacol Discount you that it was owned by a
little old lady who drove it only on Sundays. The engine's in great
shape, he says, and it runs beautifully. Now, if he knows all this to
be false, he's a liar. But is his goal to get you to believe the
opposite of the truth? No, it's to get you to buy the car. If the
things he was saying happened to Asacol Ec 400 Mg be true, he'd still say them. He'd
say them even if he had no idea who the car's previous owner was or
what condition the engine was in.
Frankfurt would say that this used-car salesman is a liar only by
accident. Even if he happens to know the truth, he decides what he's